BEHIND THE SCENES 
 
William Hurt sat down with KXL radio host Dave Paul for an interview as part of "Beyond the Headlines". Click here to listen to the segment. 

Check out the new video trailer here.

PRODUCTION HISTORY:  No Man’s Land premiered at London's Old Vic Theatre in 1974 featuring John Gielgud as Spooner, Ralph Richardson as Hirst, Michael Kitchen as Foster and Terence Rigby as Briggs. That original production was filmed for the National Theatre Archive and has been shown on British television as part of "Pinter at the BBC". The ‘90s saw the two major revivals of the play in London (with Harold Pinter playing Hirst) and on Broadway (featuring Jason Robards as Hirst and Christopher Plummer as Spooner). In 2001 Harold Pinter himself directed a production at London’s National Theatre. No Man’s Land is considered one of Pinter’s “memory plays.” From the late ’60s to the mid-‘80s, Pinter wrote a series of plays that explore complex characteristics of memory such as ambiguity and recollection through characters known for their intensity and depth.

PLAYWRIGHT:  (1930-2008) Considered one of Britain’s most influential dramatists, Harold Pinter was a playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist. He wrote 29 plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal; 21 screenplays including The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant's Woman; and directed 27 theater productions, including James Joyce's Exiles, David Mamet's Oleanna, seven plays by Simon Gray and many of his own plays including his latest, Celebration, paired with his first, The Room at The Almeida Theatre, London in the spring of 2000. In 2005, Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.In awarding Pinter the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy noted: “Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th Century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: 'Pinteresque'”

THE DIRECTOR:
John Dillon has staged productions at leading theaters in England, Russia, Egypt and Japan and has directed new works by such noted playwrights as David Mamet, Romulus Linney, Larry Shue, Ariel Dorfman, Y York, Joanna Glass, David Rambo, Anthony Clarvoe and Amlin Gray. He’s worked at over two dozen of the country’s leading regional theaters, including Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Syracuse Stage, Georgia Shakespeare, Chapel Hill’s PlayMakers Rep, the Missouri Rep, D.C.’s Arena Stage, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, New Haven’s Long Wharf, Seattle’s ACT Theatre, the Seattle Children’s Theatre, the Berkeley Rep and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (where his staging of WIT won him a BackstageWest Garland Award). 

Although he makes his home in Seattle, John is also the Associate Director of Tokyo’s Institute of Dramatic Arts (and where his productions have twice won Japan’s highest theater award). He’s the Founding President of Theatre Puget Sound, a service organization for theaters and theater workers in the Seattle area. From 1977 to 1993 he was the Artistic Director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater and during his time there launched a number of innovative exchanges with theater companies in Mexico, Russia, Ireland, Chile, Japan and England. From 2004 to 2010 he served as the director of the theatre program at Sarah Lawrence College and he currently serves as an Artist-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Dillon is a fellow in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and a member of the National Theatre Conference. He is a Danforth and Woodrow Wilson fellow with graduate degrees in theater from Columbia and Northwestern Universities.

"...under the careful yet vigorous direction of John Dillon, with great wit, physicality and tension... William Hurt plays him as a wonderfully watchable mixture, at once charming and disreputable, razor-sharp and dodgy," says Marty Hughley in an eloquent and insightful review in The Oregonian. Read the full article here.

"And so we'll get to see Nause as the accomplished but emotionally imploding Hirst, and Hurt as the loquacious yet desperate Spooner..." Marty Hughley, The Oregonian. Click here to read the full preview article.

"...this haunting drama that proves by turns funny, scary, and resonantly poetic." The Telegraph

 “[the play is about] the sense of being caught in some mysterious limbo between life and death, between a world of brute reality and one of fluid uncertainty. ... the play is a masterly summation of all the themes that have long obsessed Pinter: the fallibility of memory, the co-existence in one man of brute strength and sensitivity, the ultimate unknowability of women, the notion that all human contact is a battle between who and whom. ... It is in no sense a dry, mannerist work but a living, theatrical experience full of rich comedy in which one speech constantly undercuts another.” The Guardian (1975)